Day 1

After some uneventful plane flights that started at 4:30 in the morning our real trip begins.  We arrived in San Jose and many of our travelers had never experienced filling out custom papers and going through immigration.  We met up with our WLS host Javier, who is super nice guy and kids are warming up to him.  The next phase of the trip was to take a two and a half hour bus trip from San Jose to Sarapiqui.  The ride basically took us from the Pacific to the Caribbean side of C.R.  In route we went through a cloud forest, which was a full of lush and beautiful plants and trees immersed in a dense mass of clouds.  While admiring the forest the bus driver was passing trucks and being rather daring.  Jack and Hayes were admiring his driving technique while the rest of us were white knuckling it in the back.  We arrived at the Chilamate Rainforest Eco-retreat and I think the kids are pleased with the accommodations.  As the day slowly merged to night, the bugs started to find their way to us.  We were ending the night and the whole group was watching this bug fly around the room hoping that it wouldn’t land on them (me included).  It was roughly 4 to 5 inches long with a huge set of pinchers on its head.   Hayes and Jack were determined to catch it to take a closer look at it.  They managed to get into a Ziplock back and we were able to determine it was a Dobsonfly (look it up! I don’t think anyone would want one of those on the back of neck).  As I type most of the kids are settling down for the night…it has been a busy day.  Time to go to bed.

Jeff